Did you know Arundhati Roy has a first name which she’s dropped? She writes in her new book that when she was 18, “I dropped my first name, Susanna. Starting then, I gradually, deliberately, transformed myself into somebody else.”

That’s one of many little nuggets she reveals in Mother Mary Comes to Me. The other eye-catching one is that she had an abortion without anaesthesia when she was 22. “It was horrible. But it was done.” She then caught the overnight train to Hoshangabad on her way to Pachmarhi, where she was filming.

The book is partly an account of her troubled relationship with her mother, Mary Roy, and partly the autobiographical story of different periods of her life. It’s a riveting, if often disturbing, read.

Arundhati usually refers to her mother as Mrs Roy. On the back cover, she calls her “my gangster”. But I couldn’t help feeling she was more of a monster. When Arundhati was six and on her first plane journey, she asked her mother why her aunt........

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